On Sunday afternoon I went out and picked all of the green tomatoes. I ended up with 3 boxes of them. They’ll all be on shelves in the basement soon, slowly ripening into a shadow of what they would have become if we had more warm sunny weather. They’ll still be quite delicious in soups and stews though, so there’s no reason not to pick them and use them up. Not to mention they’ll probably add 30 lbs to my October harvest totals!
I think green tomatoes are really beautiful. In fact I almost like them more than when they’re colorful and ripe.
One reason I have this blog is to keep track of my gardening schedule. I noticed I blogged about picking my green tomatoes last year on October 19. They were made into green tomato chutney last year, but since I still have a lot of that left from last year, these tomatoes will be eaten slowly as they ripen.

What do you do with green tomatoes?

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23 Comments to “Picking the Green Tomatoes”

I agree, green tomatoes are special in their own right – I’ve made sure to get and use some green ones whenever I can. I love green tomatoes cooked with spiced potatoes. I’ll start the potatoes first, and half-way through the cooking (on the stovetop) the tomatoes go in and are cooked until they pop into a delicious sauce-like addition.
.-= Mangochild´s last blog ..Spotlight: October Eat Local Challenge Week 1 =-.

just last night I have pickeled them… I know that some people love pickeled green tomatoes, so I will see in a few weeks are they that good…
.-= vrtlaricaana´s last blog ..Propagation of Strawberries =-.

Ah…I usually let mine ripen up too. They are great for sauce, and if they turn out funky they are a great treat for chickens in November.

Last year the season went ON and ON I was almost tired of them and didn’t save as many, plus there weren’t that many left on the vines! This year? The blight took my green tomatoes too (sigh….) so no more options for me :(

I just used the last of my off the vine ripened tomatoes. Our tomato patch was struck with blight and had to be removed at the end of August. I harvested alot of tomatoes that had broke enough color that they would ripen off the vine. I lost about 1/3rd or more to later development of blight lesions – but more than half of them went on to ripen beautifully and we enjoyed some good tomatoes long after the plants were sacrificed to the plant gods.

Well, my baby plants made a lot of green tomatoes in the short space of time they had to grow, but not enough to “do” anything with — except enjoy them as they ripen, few by few. I just ate two little ones this evening. They were a treat.
.-= Helen at Toronto Gardens´s last blog ..Frost warning: Allotment post mortem =-.

That reminds me that we are in a great place where you don’t have to worry about winter so much – tomatoes can ripen on the wine throughout the year! We have just got into a bit of gardening – but we don’t realize the advantage that we have from a climate perspective. We can run outdoors, cycle, plant trees all throughout the year!

Wow – your tomatoes are so beautiful! I’m wondering how it is blight didn’t affect you? It hit us hard so I had barely any late season tomatoes – let alone green ones. Everything you grow/post always seems to look sooo healthy – what’s your secret?!

I really think it’s the organic gardening, that along with a lot of diversity in the garden. I’ve been ready a lot about permaculture and have been trying to implement it in the garden. Not everything does well though, and I will occasionally lose things to pests because I refuse to use even “organic” treatments. My broccoli got nipped by some 90 days we had in April and it never formed heads. But I let it grow and attract cabbage loopers for the wrens in the garden.

We had a pretty dry summer right here, so I think that’s why we didn’t get the tomato blight. A lady I know that lives about 15 miles away lost all her tomatoes to blight early in the summer. But they got more rain than we did here.

Why do you ripen them in the basement? I thought my grandma sat them on the sunny windowsill in their sunroom. Does the cool do something to help them ripen? I have tons of little green cherry tomatoes on my plants. And I need to take care of them soon, I think we might get a frost before next week.

I ripen them in the basement on newspaper on shelves because I don’t have room upstairs for them all. Since I picked 20-30 lbs of them I just don’t have enough space. They ripen just as well in the basement with no sun as they do on the counter. Last year my mom had some ripe one in the root cellar that we use in our new years sauerkraut.

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This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.